In the annals of “the show must go on” stories, the New York production of the Swedish drama “The Hundred We Are” stands out for its gallantry. Jonas Hassen Khemiri’s original script, a portrait of a woman at war with her various selves, calls for a cast of three.

The Origin Theater production, which runs through April 8 at the Cell in Chelsea, features four actresses, one of whom never speaks until the play’s final scene. Her lines are voiced instead by an interpolated character, identified in the program as Shadow, a character whose symbolic significance remains fuzzy at best.

Audience members in search of enlightenment are advised to read the lengthy explanatory essay included in the program. In it Erwin Maas, the show’s director, says that “only days before opening, we arrived at a point of no return.” The problem, evidently, was that the eldest of the three actresses was having trouble remembering her lines.

Mr. Maas writes: “I felt we had two options: 1. To try and hide the struggles most of us have, or will have, as we grow older, ie. Run away from them, like most do, or 2. to run toward these embarrassments, taboos, and this uncomfortable reality, and, instead, openly expose and address it.”

The sentiments expressed here are honorable and refreshing. In practice, they don’t meld easily into the presentation of a play that is in large part about evasion and denial. And if you confine yourself to the immediate experience of the production, which is the ideal way to watch a play, you find yourself nagged by questions that go beyond the purposes of the text.

These involve not only the issue of why one actress (Kitty Chen as Actress 3) is hesitantly acting out the words of another (Caitlin Cisco, as Shadow) but also the dialogue being projected on the wall behind the audience. (I noticed several people looking over their shoulders to follow along with the written lines as they were spoken.)

Normally, I’m pretty flexible in stretching my imagination to accommodate the meta-theatrical. But darned if I can make a persuasive case for what’s going here as an illumination or amplification of the play’s themes.

Mr. Maas writes in his director’s note that “Hundred” is in part about “the trials and tribulations of questioning memory.” Yet Mr. Khemiri’s script seems to be less about faulty recollection than willful delusion.

Its central (and only) character — a dissatisfied dental hygienist embodied by Mirirai Sithole and Orlagh Cassidy as well as Ms. Chen (and Ms. Cisco) — is notable for how she lies to herself to be able to live with herself (or selves). In following the phases of one woman’s life from cradle to grave through the clashing perspectives of three alter egos, “Hundred” inevitably brings to mind Edward Albee’s “Three Tall Women,” which won the 1994 Pulitzer Prize for drama.

Yet at least as it’s rendered in Frank Perry’s translation, “Hundred” lacks the linguistic grace and harsh wisdom of Mr. Albee’s play. And it fails to create a character that feels other than generic, though I suspect that Mr. Khemiri (whose earlier work includes the original and rowdy satire “Invasion!”) may have been aiming for an open-ended universality.

As best as I can determine, Ms. Cassidy is the dominant ego figure here — the one who tries to accommodate herself to the social traditions of a husband-centered, bourgeois existence; Ms. Sithole would seem to be the inner rebel and artist, while Ms. Chen and Ms. Cisco — well, I’m still a bit confused on that part.

The show has been staged in an unadorned gallery space, so the burden of interpretation falls entirely upon its cast members and how they interrelate. The four women register as a mutually empathic and protective ensemble, which doesn’t really make sense when their characters are trying to kill one another. But Ms. Cassidy brings a wry edge of subliminal satire to the proceedings, while Ms. Sithole is appropriately angry as the maverick within.

Ms. Chen finally gets to speak, quite affectingly, a concluding monologue in which all those selves dissolve into one slowly receding entity. This soliloquy provides the play with its most — and arguably only — grippingly focused moment.